How Fertilizers and Pesticides Upset our Health and the Environment

One of the epidemics that is alarmingly increasing worldwide today is obesity. Being overweight and obese chooses no age and gender and claims more lives than those who are underweight. Even physicians agree that it is one of the most challenging problems that they meet and despite the efforts of both patients and physicians, obesity is still growing in frequency.

Many methods and approaches have been recommended to fight this epidemic such as the ketogenic diet, vegetarian diet, and others. However, whether we are underweight, of normal weight or overweight, everyone must be cautious of what we eat.

The kind of food we eat has a bearing on our health and the environment

Looking at the choices of food that we eat and how we cultivate our food, we could find a broad proof that the food we eat is harmed because of the weakening of the soil and pollution. Moreover, our environment is also wounded because of the harmfulness of the industrialized method or process of how we produce and manufacture food. Therefore, efforts from the government and non-government organizations alike released a campaign to go organic.

In the United States, Americans want low-cost or inexpensive food. Because of this, an agrarian program in America has concentrated on producing huge quantities of cheap sources of calories such as corn and soy. These crops are valued because they can easily be cultivated on huge farms lands. However, the monoculture or the planting and harvesting of just one crop over and over again on a farmland weakens and exhausts the soil, therefore farmers and agrarians are forced to use bigger volumes of pesticides or insecticides and fertilizers.

Identified as xenobiotics, pesticides and herbicides are environmental contaminants and pollutants. This includes plastics, surfactants used in wrapping food, household cleaners and chemicals, and industrial substances and compounds. In addition to this, the processing of food and the transporting of it long distance not only add to air and water pollution but diminishes the nutrients of food.

For these reasons, the USDA or the US Department of Agriculture has seen a solid and fixed deterioration of the nutritional value of crops such as vitamin C, iron, riboflavin, and calcium. Because of this, we are now getting less nutrition from our food. This means that to get the same or equivalent vitamin and mineral content, we have to eat more.

People are on the top list when it comes to being exposed to multiple and intricate combinations of contaminants. Reducing our contact to these contaminants is very essential and diet really plays a critical role in fighting these toxins. By building a nutritional or dietary plan accompanied by a change in lifestyle, not only can we reduce toxic load, we also raise the capacity of the human body to clean up and filter toxins.